My West End stage fright

The Maria Assumption convent in Kensington feels a strange place to meet Michelle Collins. For a start, there are lots of nuns swishing through corridors in their habits.

One is outside mowing the grass. Another is chomping her way through a packet of Monster Munch. Bar that, it's pretty quiet, silent, almost contemplative, until - bang! - here's Michelle Collins in our midst.

She looks like a lost member of the 1970s Swap Shop team in her brightly striped T-shirt and cut-off jeans and ¸ber-trendy Ugg boots. With her Cockney accent, blonde hair and big blue eyes, she reminds me a bit of Twiggy, all limbs and eyes and patter.

"Hello!" she says, waving madly, even though I am a few feet away. "Sorry I'm late. The rehearsals ran over time."

Collins is at the nunnery to rehearse for her first West End show, Rattle of a Simple Man. It's a two-hander, starring herself and Stephen Tompkinson, about a football fan from Manchester who ends up going home with a prostitute.

"I'm the prostitute," she says. "I have to wear a corset and not a lot else. But I'm used to that!" she adds. The Monster Munch nun stops crunching. "I'm not really a tart with a heart," she says, "but someone a bit more classy, more lonely.

The play is about loneliness. Stephen's character is a mad football fan who still lives at home with his mother even though he's in his forties. Both characters are lonely and afraid."

She looks pensive but then brightens. "I'm shitting myself," she says, " absolutely bloody terrified. Me, in the West End. Can you imagine?"

Collins tends to do a lot of this. She seems to have an ingrained habit of putting herself down. When she tells me that she never went to drama school and I ask why, she says, "No one wanted me. I obviously wasn't any good."

Nevertheless, she went on to be Cindy Beale in EastEnders for 10 years. "Yes, but my agent told me not to take it. He thought I'd get typecast. Maybe I have."

But surely she's had lots of hit TV series - Two Thousand Acres of Sky, Sea of Souls, Sunburn ... Obviously, she can act. "By default!" she says.

Later on, when I ask her why she's had such a roller-coaster love life she replies, "I just can't keep a man!" She can go on like this for hours - about how she wasn't middle class enough to get roles at first.

How she was so depressed, and took it so personally, when her first job as a backing singer ended that she became anorexic in her early twenties.

"I went down to six stone," she says. "I went to audition for an advert and they phoned my agent and told him I looked too thin. I hadn't really noticed. So I started eating. I didn't go into therapy or anything like that. I did it all myself."

Collins is used to doing most things for herself. It's not just her career - deciding to be an actress when she was turned down by every single drama school she approached, eventually going against her agent's advice and taking the role of Cindy - it's her personal life as well.

"I've had a traumatic love life, I admit that," she says. "I used to be very open about it but now, after everything has gone wrong, I wish I'd never opened my mouth."

She is, at this point, referring to her relationship with Italian car mechanic Fabrizio Tassalini. They met in 1995 and, a year later, she gave birth to their daughter, Maia.

"God, I loved that man," she says. "I did all this press about him - how happy we were, how in love and everything. But things didn't work out. We argued a lot."

Their relationship flipped backwards and forwards for a couple of years after Maia's birth, and ended in 1998. "We tried to work things out," she says. "We
have a daughter together so we did try."

Since then, she's been labelled a man-eater, a "nightclub mum". "A newspaper called me that," she says. "Honestly, it's pathetic. I can't even go out for a drink without being photographed.

When I first started on EastEnders no one pried into people's love lives. Now I can barely move. I suppose I've got used to it. But I was going out with Nick Fordyce then so there probably wasn't anything to gossip about!"

She and Fordyce almost got married. "We had decided to do it but then we got drunk the night before and overslept. I'm relieved about that now. We certainly argued a lot." Since Fordyce there has been Tassalini, and then a trio of married men.

There was cameraman turned art director Mark Waters, whom she met while filming Sunburn, and lighting technician David Oldroyd on Two Thousand Acres of Sky, and then, most recently, cameraman Jonathan Beacham.

She met him on the set of the BBC drama Ella and the Mothers and pretty soon he'd left his long-term partner and young child for her. They have, apparently, split up.

A few months ago she was photographed, somewhat the worse for wear, leaving a nightclub with another man while Beacham was away working.

"Oh, I'm not going into that," she says. "I'm 41. I'm too old for that malarkey. I used to lie about my age but I can't be bothered any more. I barely go out. When I do, I like to have a good time, but I've given up smoking and I'm hardly propping up the bar every night.

"I work very hard. It's a terrible double standard. Women get so judged by the press these days. 'Who's looking after her child?' is what the headlines usually say, accompanied by a picture of me, trolleyed, getting into a taxi and flashing my knickers."

Essentially, she says, she lives on her own. "I see Fabrizio all the time because he lives down the road and is very involved with Maia. We even go on holiday together. In fact, we get on better now than we did when we were together."

But is there anyone in her life now? She turns bright red. "Erm, well, no, well, yes," she splutters. I'd read she was seeing a Dutch cameraman called Gavin Poolman. "He's not a cameraman," she says. "I just can't talk about it now. Every time I talk about it, everything goes wrong."

She says she'd rather talk about the play. "I'm very excited by it," she says. "I haven't done theatre for years. Oh God, I hope I'm not crap. I hope I'm believable."

Well, does she think she is believable? "I can identify with my character," she says. Is it because she recognises those feelings of loneliness? "That's a difficult one," she says.

"I don't think I feel lonely. I was attracted to the part because I suppose I like playing damaged characters. As Cindy, I didn't smile for 10 years! I was interested in playing a prostitute. What makes a woman do that? I don't believe that any prostitute is happy with what she does."

But is Michelle Collins happy? As a child, she says she was very shy. "My sister, Vicki, was the chatty one, the pretty one. She could talk to boys. I never could. I was shy and plain on the outside but bursting to escape on the inside. I think that's why I became an actress."

But she also says she had an " idyllic childhood" with Vicki and her mother, Mary. "My mother brought us up on her own until we were 15 and 16. She met my stepfather then.

I suppose we didn't have much money but I wasn't aware of that. I do remember once going out for dinner somewhere, nowhere grand or anything, and my mum getting us two meals and sharing it between three plates.

"But she was great, my mum, young and really cool. She would dress me and my sister the same because we were only a year apart.

Sometimes she would wear the same clothes as us as well. I remember her dropping us off at school and we were all wearing hot pants and bunches and everyone was staring."

But then she and Vicki, who is a Child Protection Officer, didn't speak for quite a while. "We are chalk and cheese," says Collins. "In the end we went to different secondary schools.

We grew up in Highbury so I went to grammar school there and she went to one in Primrose Hill. We didn't see eye to eye for years but now she's my best friend."

Collins is obviously used to being surrounded by people - nannies, personal assistants, the housekeeper, her daughter, men, friends, lovers - and yet her sister has said in the past that she believes Collins's life is like a house of cards.

"She works so hard," Vicki said. "I think she worries that if she stops, everything will come falling down."

Vicki went on to say that she believes the answer to all this insecurity in her sister's life is the love of a good man. Collins snorts when I remind her of this. "Pah!" she says. "I just don't think it happens for me. Deep down I'd love to have another child. I know I'm pushing it at 41 but I would really love it."

That she's thinking of it at all implies she is in a more serious relationship than she is letting on. "I may be," she says coquettishly. "But Maia always says she likes being an only child. She loves to be loved. Just like her father."

But maybe that's like her mother, too. Despite all her insecurities, Michelle Collins must enjoy being an actress, or else why do it? "That's true," she says, "but lots of actors are introverts. We're all desperately insecure. Maybe we need all that love from fans."

At that moment a tall, dark man comes up waving a camera. He and his friends are on a tour of the convent and he has spotted Collins. "Photo?" he says to her. She looks rather taken aback. "Of me?" she says. "Photo!" he says again. "But where are you from?" she asks.

"Colombia!" he says." How do you know who I am?" she asks. The man looks puzzled. "I no know who you be," he says. "I just want photo of me and friends!" "That," she says, blushing furiously, "really is embarrassing."

Rattle of A Simple Man opens at the Comedy Theatre on 6 May. Information: 0870 060 6622.